Supported by an impressive investor and advisor group, including Google’s Larry Page & Eric Schmidt, Ph.D.; film maker & explorer James Cameron; Chairman of Intentional Software Corporation and Microsoft’s former Chief Software Architect Charles Simonyi, Ph.D.; Founder of Sherpalo and Google Board of Directors founding member K. Ram Shriram; and Chairman of Hillwood and The Perot Group Ross Perot, Jr., the company will overlay two critical sectors – space exploration and natural resources – to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP. This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of ‘natural resources’.

Peter Diamandis created the Xprize and it appears he gained the support of many of his Xprize board of trustees for his asteroid mining venture.

The X Prize Foundation is a ­mini-industry, with 50 employees. It is ­holding competitions in education, global development, energy and the ­environment, life sciences and space and undersea exploration (see box, p. 76). Its board of trustees crackles with ­celebrities: director James Cameron; Huffington Post cofounder Arianna Huffington; inventors Dean Kamen and Kurzweil; Craig Venter, the entrepreneur and biologist who raced the U.S. government to decode the human genome; Indian billionaire Ratan Tata, who ­presides over the world’s fifth-largest steel empire; Larry Page; Tesla Auto’s Elon Musk.

Google's Larry Page is worth about $19 billion.
Google's Eric Schmidt is worth about $7 billion.
K. Ram Shriram has a net worth of about $1.6 billion.
James Cameron has a net worth of about $700 million.
Charles Simonyi has a net worth of about $1 billion.